rogerbourland.com

Insisting on seeing music

I know that Renewable Music and Loose Poodle have blogged on this topic, but I find myself in a funny quandry if I think too hard about the success of YouTube. I have had a blessed life in having had many, many wonderful premieres and performances of my music, many of which were recorded. However, only a handful of them, some of my GALA cantatas from the early 90s, were ever video-taped. So I guess that puts my music in the pre-YouTube generation and therefore relatively unavailable to that generation. I notice from my own blog’s statistics, that people rarely seem to click the mp3 players to listen to musical examples I’ve put up. This is discouraging to me as I would really like to return to posts with musical examples, but if no one listens to them, why waste my time? I have to find something on YouTube in order to get anyone to listen. Music has to be SEEN nowadays, and not just heard. Does this bode well for live performances? Maybe, maybe not.

Daniel or Peter told me once that they have little use for listening to film music by itself. It wasn’t meant to be listened to that way. My friend David has an enormous film music collection and he listens to it all the time, without the visual images that original inspired it. However, in my flu induced weekend, I decided to revisit the first 3 Harry Potter films. The music, beautifully written and orchestrated, always fits the scene like a glove, and watching how it does so adds another dimension to my appreciation of the movies. Would I want to listen to this score away from the movies? Well, maybe, sometimes, but now agree with Peter and Daniel that it is best appreciated in context.

At UCLA, we offer our students the option of video-taping their recitals, even though they have to pay extra for it. I’m not surprised that they nearly all opt for this.

Powering through being sick

On Monday I had a nasty onslaught of flu. My muscles were sore and my skin ached all over. Seemed like flu. But I had a busy week. I canceled my appointments on Monday, but decided to just live on Tylenol Severe Flu medication all week — which worked, until about Friday. I had 3 hours of rather intense meetings in the morning, and then I drove Peter and Armin around the Westside to look at neighborhoods where they are considering buying a home. And despite that I had a snazzy new suit on, thinking I looked good, Peter said I looked like death warmed over and that I should just go home and go to bed, I refused and powered through taking them on a quickie tour of Palms, Mar Vista, Culver City, and parts of Santa Monica and West LA. After dropping them off, I drove home and collapsed. We had a party that night, but I had to just stay in bed. So many of my friends were over and I had to resist popping another Tylenol Flu pill and powering through it, and visiting with them all. And today, I have a barbeque with friends and colleagues that I’ve been looking forward to for some time, and I’m afraid I should just stay in bed. Still dizzy, achey, but my mind is still going. So I’m going to make myself stop this blog right now, and go back to bed.

Some people just don’t know how to stop.

Four Roger Bourlands

For the sake of anyone trying to find “Roger Bourland” I know that there are at least four of them.

My father’s father was a Roger but died some years back, so I’ll exclude him. My father, James Roger Bourland, Jr., is a retired Methodist/UCC minister who lives with my mother in Sun City West, Arizona. He is now an active blogger with three blogs, and has picked up photography again as a passionate hobby. His blogs are:

There’s Always Something where he opines on politics and life in general.
East of Eden is a wabi sabi, zen type blog for concise pithy thoughts and posts.
more than we thought is his one-a-day photo blog that is quite popular.

The next RB is roger bourland, who is a wedding photographer and no relation to my father. I don’t know him, I think he lives in Santa Barbara, CA and he actually makes his living as a photographer, unlike my father or me who do it as a passionate hobby. So if you need a photographer for your wedding, contact roger bourland and not me or my dad.

The next RB is me, Roger Bourland III, yes I am the third, but I don’t usually use that suffix, and my nickname growing up was “Bo.” I never had the James in my name. My dad dropped the James for most of his career and then added it back at some point, so technically I’m not really the IIIrd. I am a composer and professor of music at UCLA, who also blogs and is a non-professional photographer (see my website for my pics).

And lastly, my nephew, James Roger Bourland IV, is the 13 year old son of my brother, Andrew — himself a master blogger (see bourland.com) and founder of Click Z — who lives with his family in Andover, MA. “Little” Roger is growing in leaps and bounds and is a hard core baseball enthusiast and does not have a blog or take photos.

Mate Universe

Here is an image from a new collection by artist/designer Mate Steinforth. His website, beautifully made, is called Mate Universe and shows off his brilliant eye for color, design, and proportion.

Elvis Presley: Hound Dog (1956)

Here is a marvlously raw and gritty video of Elvis singing “Hound Dog.” His moves titillated a generation of hormone popping teens, and younger. I remember this song so well as a little boy. I remember slicking my hair back and doing an Elvis impersonation for one of my baby sitters. As far as I was concerned, I sounded exactly like Elvis.

But what odd lyrics, calling a girl a dog, just because she cries. The song is simple blues form, so there’s nothing unusual harmonically. But the melodic hammering of that naughty “blue third” urged a generation to be naughty. Mmmm mm.

Hound Dog

You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog
cryin’ all the time.
You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog
cryin’ all the time.
Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit
and you ain’t no friend of mine.

When they said you was high classed,
well, that was just a lie.
When they said you was high classed,
well, that was just a lie.
You ain’t never caught a rabbit
and you ain’t no friend of mine.

—————————————-

Original lyrics

You ain’t nothin but a hound dog, been snooping round my door
You ain’t nothin but a hound dog, been snooping round my door
You can wag your tail but Lord I ain’t gonna feed you no more

You told me you were high class, but I can see through that
You told me you were high class, but I can see through that
And daddy I know you ain’t no real cool cat

You ain’t nothin but a hound dog, been snooping round my door
You ain’t nothin but a hound dog, been snooping round my door
You can wag your tail but Lord I ain’t gonna feed you no more

You made me feel so blue, you made me weep and moan
You made me feel so blue, you made me weep and moan
You ain’t looking for a woman,
Lord knows what you’re looking for

You ain’t nothin but a hound dog, been snooping round my door
You ain’t nothin but a hound dog, been snooping round my door
You can wag your tail but Lord I ain’t gonna feed you no more

[Lyrics by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.
Recorded by Big Mama Thornton; Elvis Presley (1956).]

Gram Parsons: Juanita (Sheryl Crow, Emmy Lou Harris)

A famous Gram Parsons/Chris Ethridge song from the Flying Burrito Brothers first album, “Juanita” sung here by Gram’s champion, Emmy Lou Harris and the fabulous Sheryl Crow.

Filipino Prisoners do Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”

Here is one of the most popular videos that bloggers post. Some bossy queen trapped in a Filipino prison convinced the prison warden to turn the prison into a movement class. So much fun!

Hard times for studio musicians in LA

I went to a party for our good friend Steve, just back from 6 months away, doing special effects for an upcoming movie about John Adams (the president, not the composer). During the party, he kept a looping slide show in the living room of candid snapshots of various places they worked around the world. Beautiful scenery, costumes, buildings surrounded in green screen. A number of the crew was there at the party, so it was a largely a special effects group and other friends of Steve and Manuel. I was introduced to David who is married to a graphic designer, and earns his living writing music for TV. We hit it off and had an interesting chat about the LA scene for musicians.

“There are probably 200 musicians in LA that get all the work in film and television. Everyone else doesn’t work much. I have friends who are leaving LA, even some who are giving up music entirely. I know this violist who is a genius, just a brilliant performer and musician. Now he sells real estate in Oregon and doesn’t play. [...] It’s so much cheaper to record outside of LA. That breaks my heart. I like to hire local musicians, but damn it is so expensive. Sometimes I’ll just hire a group of 5 to 7 musicians and record them over and over so it sounds big.”

I’ve heard from a lot of musicians in their 50s and 60s who are tired. Being a musician is a hard job. And you have to keep doing it your whole life. As a freelance musician, you’ve got to keep yourself out there, always getting more work. If you’re lucky, you get a lot of calls just because you are known to be good and dependable. Having a steady job in an orchestra or teaching privately or in a school, offers more security.

For someone who has never taught, and at age 60 decides they want to teach, getting work is tricky because they have no experience teaching. That apparent deficiency can disappear when a school or part of the country values that particular skill. For instance, a flute player who has played on many scoring sessions for films AND is a good teacher, could get a job in in another city over a traditional flutist because of the Hollywood experience. Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Boston University PhDs are a dime a dozen in Boston. That’s why it’s best to get out of town so your degree means something. LA musicians need to consider the same thing.

Big orchestral scores are expensive and somewhat rare in Hollywood these days, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Most of us combine acoustic instruments with electro-acoustic sounds. That means less musicians are needed in this big town. San Francisco has the same glut of too many musicians and not enough work to support them all.

Does this mean schools should cut back on the number of music majors we graduate? And there should be less departments and schools of music? I don’t think so. Nature overproduces itself, we might as well follow suit.

Loudon Wainwright III and Philip Glass on NBC (1989)

I include this video as a kind of blog bookmark in my Rufus Wainwright research. It was captured by someone watching TV in a hotel room and filming it with a video camera. On the TV is Loudon Wainwright III on NBC, show not identified, playing with an unidentified duo (a black man on bass and a white woman on violin who he calls “boys” — oops) singing a protest song about Jesse Helms’s attempt to censor the NEA in 1989. The song is really quite strong and sung beautifully. Following this song Loudon introduces Philip Glass, yes, Philip Glass who plays his own “Metamorphosis II” on the piano. I had never seen PG play the piano, so this was interesting for me to watch.

The point of all this is that I’d be willing to bet that young Rufus Wainwright saw this show and some years later composed “The Art Teacher.” For those of you that know the song, combine the two songs on this video, and you’ll hear what I mean. For those of you that don’t know “Art Teacher” here is a lovely TV performance.

Ian Andrews: A Million Angels (1985)

A fascinating find is Ian Andrews’ video “A Million Angels.” The various comments from the people on YouTube talk about it in warm and fuzzy way (”those ‘old’ clips” and “a classic”) so I guess I missed this one when it first came out. I found the music annoying on first listen, but “got it” after two or three more. The fascinating part of this “found object” video is the fundamentalist preacher, but we only see his flattened 2-D almost cartoon-like shape and body movement. It seems as though he is singing it but he isn’t. The sound world here is dominated by the old Fairlight synthesizers of the mid-80s. The notes provided by Tom Ellard say:

(By request) This 1985 video was created in real time as a video ‘jam’ or improvisation. It features a preacher scratched by Ian Andrews on betacam tape, fed through Fairlight CVI and analogue video synthesiser.

The CVI signal is notable for not filling the whole screen (it had a resolution of 256 squared) and introducing a delay that causes the signal to shift to the right.